I see no reason to doubt the first barn message: it was signed by “The Butcher”, Pleo is confirmed as “The Butcher”, and I can’t think of a scenario where another player would have known that the vig was going to be colored as “The Butcher”.
my first thought on reading the second barn message was an invite from one mason to another in the absence of any off-board communication; is there such a thing as PFK third-party masons? assuming not, I imagine we’re best off just letting these two search each other out and hope they can communicate well enough to make the best decision of the options available to them.
knowing that the format of each barn message is entirely up to the author, I think the third message deserves at least a little scrutiny.
“wolf’s” v “wolves” - I have trouble imagining that a SDMB regular would make this mistake genuinely, so my first thought is scum fucking with us; if that’s the case, do we disregard the entire message or just ignore the grammar?
before the last mafia game I played, this next thought never would have occurred to me, and is probably completely ridiculously/paranoid: what if “wolf’s” was correct, but the genuine mistake was the exclusion of the next word, ie. “the wolf’s _______ cannot kill the Serial killer”.
finally, is there any potential meaning to the purposeful capitalization of “Serial” but not killer?
Occam’s razor would indicate that Pleo wrote the first note which would imply that his role PM contained some perfect information about other players. I’ve certainly played other games like that. The problem is, if Town roles get such perfect info nuggets in some of their PMs, it would follow that scum and third parties may have some as well. I think we got lucky that Pleo’s (self-aware) alteration of us usual Day 1 play and it’s possible consequences, his getting killed (a possible consequence), and flip with his name reveal solidified him as the most likely author of the first message. In other words, I don’t think it is a coincidence that a note was signed with a name that was about to flip. I think that is the most compelling evidence that Pleo was indeed the author.
However, if there are little nuggets of perfect information floating around, I think we’re in for more barn messages like the 3rd one. Who knows who wrote it, what their motivation was, or whether or not the information is being presented accurately. Again, I think we got lucky in that we have some supporting data about the apparent win-stealing PFK thanks to Pleo’s apparent message. But the safest thing to do, imho, is to consider all possible combinations of alignment/motivation/validity/accuracy when it comes to what is presented in the Barn messages, or any other magic bag or claim until they are confirmed.
I mentioned the grammar as a joke, but honestly, so far in this thread I’ve seen people use no capitalization (uh, you), no punctuation (Lightfoot) and typo worries apparently due to texting autocorrect (Meeko) – and also remember, the SDMB membership is really, despite our apparent beliefs to the contrary, not the smartest contingent on the planet. And even if we were, not everyone who plays Mafia is typical SDMB fodder; many Mafia players seem to come here from other places (Giraffe, Idle, even Facebook) where people don’t leap for the throat of anyone who mistakes the plural for the possessive.
So there’s plenty of WIFOM in looking too carefully at the lack of capitalization and/or punctuation in that last message. Not saying it’s meaningless, but it also means it’s kind of a null tell. For example, did I mention my job on purpose (pro editor) to make it seem less likely that I wrote that final message? I have no doubt some may think so. (Ooh I really wanted to write, “You might think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.” I have House of Cards on the brain these days.)
I’m also curious if Astral is just as dubious at everyone else now that others are doing way more questioning of Pleo’s first post than I ever did. I never doubted it’s from Pleonast myself.
And I just realized that while story said the Barn messages can be formatted however the writer wants them, I don’t think s/he said whether that blue text was part of the writer’s formatting or story’s own (now that “The Butcher” has been revealed to be the Town Vig).
If it’s not asking for too much info, story, was the blue text your formatting, or the writer’s?
The gambit I was implying was for Suburban to be scum (or 3rd party) and put that information out there to throw us off the trail. He’d be gambling that we consider him Town because of it and would remain safe. It’s possible that’s what’s happening. But I’m of the opinion that it’s unlikely and that he’s Town. The reason I’ve come to that conclusion is because it’s more likely that scum Suburban would want to do nothing suspicious whatsoever rather than voluntarily put himself in front of a bulls-eye by throwing out a nugget of information that could come back to bite him in the ass.
On the other side…“trust, but verify.” I’m ok with the statement now, but if Suburban was protected, he was protected by someone. So there’s someone out there who can confirm his claim and I’m expecting that to happen at some point in the game or eventually, I’ll consider the scales to have shifted over to “gambit” by scum or 3rd party. When that happens, I don’t know. But it’ll be something I consider.
Thanks for clarifying. I caught that you were worried about a gambit somewhere, but it didn’t sound to me like you were suspecting Burby as being complicit in it. Assuming he is being truthful, and the same thing happened to me, I would probably say something about as coy as he did, only having a vague, mysterious, and unexpected Mod note to go on.
Sorry for being absent today - Child B has tonsillitis. A cheap and obvious way to get attention, you might think, but a surprisingly successful one.
Messages - not much to add to the consensus: one that’s clear and believable*; one that’s (probably) clear to at least one of us; one that is almost too Wifom-y to waste time thinking about. But in short:
There’s an SK; they will steal the win if they’re alive at the end. Therefore someone has to kill them. If the third message is accurate, then it’ll have to be us (and with our Vig dead it’ll have to be via lynch, it seems). If it’s not true, then we do better to let the Scum kill the SK - and they do better to let us do it. This leads to a game of SK chicken which runs a substantial risk of being won by the SK. However:
We don’t need to worry about it now, nor for a couple of Days. Sniffing out an SK isn’t so very different from sniffing out Scum; if we stick with lynching wrong’ uns, we’ll do okay for now. Also, the SK may very well solve the problem by turning up dead one morning.
So having spent this much time going on about the mysterious import of the significant messages, I’m going to stop.
True, but story described the writing as “in white paint.” If the message was color-coded by Pleo, shouldn’t the description have said “in white and blue paint” instead?
There is a >90% chance I’m overthinking this. I just wanted to ask story to be sure.
And yet it was still almost worth it!
(I haven’t seen the new HoC yet; I can’t imagine a better Francis than Ian Richardson, but Kevin Spacey is probably the best alternative. No one does dry wit like he does.)
I think you’re over-thinking it. Anything not directly included in the no more than 10 words we each get, I’d consider Mod-supplied color, regardless of what color any of those 10 words might be.
But why would **story **add color-formatting to the message? The only possible reason I can think of is that The Butcher, having been killed during the Night, was confirmed as Town…but even that doesn’t really sound plausible.
I’m pretty sure that the message writer intended it to be printed exactly as-is, color and all. And it makes perfect sense that **Pleonast **would have sent it. The only thing that doesn’t quite click is why **story **described it as being written in white paint, when part of it wasn’t.
And that’s the part where I start to think I’m over-thinking it.
NETA and upon re-read that isn’t what I was suggesting, that Story added the blue. I think Pleo specifically asked for two of his words to be in blue. I re-state that I think the 10 words or less will come directly from the player, but anything else around those 10 words or less will be the result of the brain of the Mod.
I understand we may all be overthinking (yeah, that’s newsworthy: Mafia Players in Overthinking Shocker!) but I just want to stress that the only reason I’m asking for this to be clarified is that if it was Pleo, and if anyone can ask for his or her name (or some other identifier) in blue, then we shouldn’t assume that the font color means anything, because Scum would obviously take advantage of our natural inclination to trust blue text.
Not that Pleonast wasn’t Town, because obviously he was. But even if he weren’t, he could have used blue. And if we didn’t ask these questions of story we’d be wondering if this meant the writer was Town or not.
I don’t think everyone would be wondering that. The barn mechanic, while novel, has seemed pretty straight forward to me, especially with Story’s clarifcation a few posts ago.
I’m not understanding what’s so hard to understand. story flat out said that anyone using the barn could format the message however they like; that means anyone could include a blue name signature; unless story explicitly says otherwise (prediction: he won’t), the blue in Pleo’s message was added by Pleo.
Sorry for not posting yesterday; I was visiting family… you know how that is. Anyway, let’s wade into the “Barn discussion”. I’ll start with message number one, as is customary. It seems entirely likely (from what I’ve seen from Pleonast’s play that this is what happened:
He saw he got a killing role, but was obligated to kill each Night
He also saw this as the drawback it really is: you have to kill each Night and are more likely to miss (hit town) than to hit scum. This, of course, lead him to
Coily indicate he had a power role to draw crosshairs on himself during that Night and
Kill the least participative player during the Night (since that player, even if (s)he was town was more of a problem than an asset for town
If I’m guessing right, I’ll have to say: My hat’s off to you, Sir Butcher. You served Town well!
The second message: I’ve quoted a few voices who seem to think it is some kind of Mason communication. I vote: Out yourselves, Masons! But only if there are more than two of you! My reasoning: Town always has a less information than scums do. So, this information would definitely help Town far more than it would hamper it at this early stage. Masons who come out too late in the game represent a problem for town, since there’s always the risk that there’s a simultaneous outing of a fake masonic brotherhood (composed of scum). Right now, however, if we had 3 or more of our number confirmed (by investigations, hopefully ), we would narrow down our field of suspects.
I’ll continue my analysis sof the barn messages in my next post.
Are aware there’s a serial killer whom they cannot kill and
Prod town to ferret out the Serial Killer
Why? Well, they can’t Night-Kill him/her and they know that a Serial Killer Hunt would de facto turn into a witch hunt/wild goose chase. I think a good Serial Killer can’t easily be found; (s)he would do their best to be a good townie by Day and kill pretty much randomly at Night.
So, I singled out three players who immediately harped on the grammatic content of the message. My guess is: the Scum conclave wrote it specifically to have us looking for any player whose grammar is less than perfect to single them out for a lynch. Therefore, any and all who pointed out the grammar errors quickly would be left out of lynching consideration.
My main candidate for lynch today is
**Vote choie **
for his/her mention yesterDay of his/her knowledge about pizza’s innocence added to his/her immediate attack on the grammatic angle.
Strong candidates are **fubbleskag **and Silver Jan, but I’ll have to dig through their participation yesterDay before I vote for them as well.
For pity’s sake, it was a JOKE. And if that was the scum gambit then they’re unbelievably stupid, or they think we are.
By the way, as a pro tip to y’all who may not have noticed this phenomenon, forum mods and admins know that one of the most common things sockpuppets do, when they try to create alternate personas, is write as if they’re barely literate. It’s a way of covering their real writing style. So you get a lot of people writing like e.e. cummings or using L33T or teen textspeak or they use lots of emoticons/LOLspeak and so on. (Look at folks like umkay or any other of the myriad of socks the SDMB has had.) My guess that’s what the “wolf’s” thing was about.
So if you want my considered opinion, the apostrophe is either a) a simple typo (y’know, like everyone does… except me, of course. Especially since the game allows for editing, hallelujah!) or b) a wolf hiding his writing style. Null tell, as I’ve said before.
Oh em gee. It was a J. O. K. E., Sherlock.
Also, what are you talking about my (and I’m a she) knowledge of pizza’s innocence? I VOTED for the guy! I thought his taking a leadership position and pushing players into a certain direction felt scummy, although (as I also said) that is typical of him because he’s a take-charge kind of player. Pizza always seems somewhat guilty to me, as a matter of fact. True, I know I said he definitely had a less scummy vibe than Guiri, if that’s what you’re talking about. That’s as close as I got to knowing he was innocent until he flipped.
But you’re clearly onto something. We should absolutely vote for everyone who didn’t vote for Pizza! Clearly they ALL knew he was innocent! Of course, this means there are like 14 scum in the game! In which I call foul, story; this game is way unbalanced!
I never doubted it’s from Pleonast myself.